PRINT EDITION

October 2008

Cooking - and making memories - with Southern favorite Paula Deen

Paula Deen may be a walking food - and - entertainment conglomerate, but success hasn't dimmed her sincerely charming and caring ways. "I always remain true to my roots," says Deen from her home in Savannah, Georgia. "God has been very good to me."Once a single mom with a simple entrepreneurial idea, Deen launched a box...

Teammates in arms

Since the publication of his beautiful memoir of growing up in Montana, The House of Sky (1979), Ivan Doig has been hailed as a great Western writer. That reputation was burnished by the publication of his marvelous Montana trilogy, English Creek (1984), Dancing at the Rascal Fair (1987) and Ride With Me, Mariah Montana (1990), which masterfully...

Police story

The problem with catching literary lightning, as Dennis Lehane did with Mystic River, is, how do you follow it? Now that he has done so, and even surpassed himself, with his deeply moving historical novel The Given Day, the problem falls to readers to find something—anything—that doesn't pale in comparison once they've closed...

When all the wrong wishes come true

Wouldn't it be great if you could always find the perfect parking spot? Or if every time you went shopping, all the most amazing clothes looked perfect on you and were on sale? Or what if you had the ability to stay out of trouble? Or to have a perfect hair day, every single day? The characters in Justine Larbalestier's new book for...

Romance Column by Christie Ridgway

Kim Lenox's Night Falls Darkly, an atmospheric tale of romance and the supernatural set in Victorian England, will give readers chills. Heroine Elena Whitney's past is as mysterious to her as the guardian who came to her rescue three years before. Though she lives in his house, Archer, Lord Black, has never shown his face, and Elena is free to pursue a medical career in London. But when...

Book Clubs Column by Julie Hale

The Indian ClerkLeavitt's 12th book is an ambitious historical novel that explores the remarkable bond between two mathematicians in the early 1900s. When Srinivasa Ramanujan, an accounts clerk in Madras, sends a letter containing number theorems to G.H. Hardy, a mathematician at Cambridge, Hardy sees genius in the calculations and invites Ramanujan to England to collaborate. Enlisting a...

Cooking Column by Sybil Pratt

A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes by David Tanis is a cookbook with attitude, not to mention the 100 recipes and 24 menus included. That attitude comes from working with the legendary Alice Waters at Chez Panisse for the last 25 years and from David's own core belief that "the best meals mirror nature and celebrate the seasonal," that simple food, simply served, can be a pure,...

Whodunit Column by Bruce Tierney

While we should be duly impressed with Archer Mayor's 19 Joe Gunther novels, it must be noted that William G. Tapply has penned no fewer than 24 novels featuring Boston attorney Brady Coyne. His latest, Hell Bent, reintroduces a ghost from Coyne's past, old flame Alex Sinclair, whom he has not seen in the seven years following their rather acrimonious split. She has not paid the visit...

Audio Column by Sukey Howard

"Delicious" and "fun" are not adjectives usually used in describing a murder mystery, but they're right on for John Darnton's Black & White and Dead All Over, read by Phil Gigante. Darnton, a Pulitzer Prize winner who spent 40 years at the New York Times, obviously had a ball creating this classic whodunit that offers a good look at the inner workings of a world...

Well Read Column by Robert Weibezahl

Like fellow Brit Muriel Spark, David Lodge is a writer of comedies with decidedly bleak underpinnings, and his new novel shares a funereal kinship with Spark's comic masterwork of death, Memento Mori. The main character in Deaf Sentence is losing his hearing, but as the punning nature of its title implies, the book offers a broader consideration of aging and mortality. Odd subject matter...